Re: [Qemu-devel] VirtualBox PC virtualization released as Open Source

[Oliver Gerlich]

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Oliver Gerlich schrieb:
> Hello,
> 
> as I was just reading this on german newsticker heise.de:
> http://www.heise.de/open/news/meldung/83680
> 
> Also on Slashdot:
> http://it.slashdot.org/it/07/01/15/1631234.shtml
> 
> And the original news:
> http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/News
> 
> 
> Anyone knows more about this? How is it in direct comparison with Qemu?

Just installed the Etch .deb (went well, even kernel module compilation;
though it didn't get the permissions of /dev/vboxdrv quite right). The
GUI is really good; it was easy to configure a new VM. For testing, I
started Ubuntu Edgy Desktop CD in VB and Qemu (0.8.2, taken from CVS in
Nov. 2006), both without hard disk, with audio, with 192 MB, with normal
kqemu (no kernel emulation).

Both systems start in reasonable time (didn't measure it, though).
It seems like the VB graphics emulation is snappier: in Qemu, it always
feels (and always felt) somewhat laggy and slow, while in VB it felt
faster. Note: I tried Qemu with and without -std-vga; in VB I didn't
install any guest stuff. In general, graphics in VB seem faster; while
in Qemu I could notice how the menus were displayed (first the frame,
then the interior), in VB the menus were "immediately" there. I think
that's a very important thing, because currently Qemu _feels_ slow on
the desktop, even though it's CPU performance is probably as fast as VBs
or VMWares! Hopefully the VB devs will give some of their improvements
back to Qemu (apparently their graphics emulation is based on Qemu's).
Afterthought: using Qemu with -kernel-kqemu makes the menu drawing as
fast as with VB, but mouse still feels laggy.

What else: VB sound was choppy when playing a video, while in Qemu the
same video was with good sound, bad choppy display.
It seems like VB doesn't use something like -kernel-kqemu; during Ubuntu
boot, host CPU was only used by userland apps, while with Qemu with
- -kernel-kqemu 80% of host CPU was used by kernel.
VB offers some guest tools (didn't try them), but without guest tools
there is smooth mouse-transition (Qemu does this nicely with tablet
emulation).

All in all I like VB for its easy GUI and good responsiveness; hopefully
this can be combined with Qemus broad host arch support :-)

Regards,
Oliver

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